[markwisde]

Indeed. Royalties are the issue. I just published a book with a well-known editor and I’m making 10% per copy (ebook or print). The book is priced at more than 50$ and yet I’ll only make this amount by selling 10 copies (of course this is before tax).

Interestingly, if your editor has an affiliate program you can make as much money by advertising some link that leads to purchases. So as a writer, if you do both you end up getting 20% on these. It’s still not that much.

Recently, I wrote a small handbook about security and the mindset you need to care about security in your company (https://www.securityhandbook.io) and I self published it for 20$ using stripe checkout. Every purchase yields me a bit more than 19$, which feels amazing every time as I directly get the money. I actually made more money selling this self published book than with my big editing company.

[beezle]

I have had a 300 page, trade sized (6x9)soft cover book in publication since late 2012. Lightning Source/Ingram Spark handles the printing and distribution. It is a very niche title that has sold about 1500 copies with the only advertising a max $1 daily limit google ad that runs only a few days/hours of the week.

Ingram allows publishers (I wear both hats) to set the wholesale cut and whether or not to take returns. Bricks and mortar book stores require you take take returns and give them at least a 50% cut. I never wanted to go there so do not take returns and give a 26% cut, 1% over the Amazon minimum.

My print cost is roughly $5.25 and I clear a little over $6 a copy. I also have a kindle e-book edition available directly through Amazon at a list of $9.99 that nets me $6.70 a copy. I sell print copies about 3:1 over the e-book.

Unless the title is a tome, it can be printed as b&w with a print cost in the $4-8 range. Everything after that depends on your competition (for retail price) and your wholesale discount.

At the end of the day I don't see anyone getting rich on any book sales, print or electronic, that are not best sellers from known authors/celebrities. However, as supplemental income you can definitely make some coin with little post authorship effort whether print or e-book.

[la_fayette]

Ok cool, congratulations to the security handbook! I have checked prices for printing books, because I am in the process of writing a regional mountain bike guide book. Although, I only find deals for 3-5$ per book... 1$ seems quite cheap to me.

[panopticon]

It's hard to tell based on the material available on the website, but it looks like their book isn't physical. If you go through the checkout process, it doesn't gather shipping information. I assume the <$1 figure was just the Stripe transaction costs.

[markwisde]

Yes indeed! It is an ebook. I should probably write that in the landing page :)

[dorchadas]

Can I ask how you went about self-publishing and selling via a website? I'm considering this with a couple of short guidebooks I've written for learning a specific language, among other things, and am very curious how you got started and set it up with Stripe checkout and manage delivery, etc.

[markwisde]

- Create a landing page via Github and use Github pages or Cloudflare pages to automatically update your domain when you push to your repo

- set up stripe checkout on the client side only (so you dont have to deal with server logic)

- simply send the book by email when you get a customer

This was my MVP as I didn’t get the time to automate things on the server side. As it’ll get more tedious I’ll find the time to implement that, but so far it’s worked well!

[tidenly]

I beg you, please - add padding-left:0; to that Table of Contents section ul

[markwisde]

You mean text-align: left?

[underdeserver]

I'd wrap the ul with a div with display: inline-flex and set text-align: left.